AI Article Synopsis
- It's really hard to predict how people with phobias, like a fear of spiders, will act when they face their fear.
- Some studies say they usually try to avoid what scares them, but this study found that they actually look at the scary thing too, just in a different way.
- The results showed that people with spider phobias responded quickly at times but also hesitated a lot during tasks involving spiders, which means they have different ways of dealing with their fear.
Article Abstract
Predicting the behavior of phobic patients in a confrontational situation is challenging. While avoidance as a major clinical component of phobias suggests that patients orient away from threat, findings based on cognitive paradigms indicate an attentional bias towards threat. Here we present eye movement data from 21 spider phobics and 21 control subjects, based on 3 basic oculomotor tasks and a visual exploration task that included close-up views of spiders. Relative to the control group, patients showed accelerated reflexive saccades in one of the basic oculomotor tasks, while the fear-relevant exploration task evoked a general slowing in their scanning behavior and pronounced oculomotor avoidance. However, this avoidance strongly varied within the patient group and was not associated with the scores from spider avoidance-sensitive questionnaire scales. We suggest that variation of oculomotor avoidance between phobics reflects different strategies of how they cope with threat in confrontational situations.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.05.005 | DOI Listing |
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